What's to be baffled about? Exercise is tiring, time-consuming, and sometimes painful. People generally avoid such activities, absent any overriding motivation.
Exercise can certainly be tiring, if you're training for performance, or rehabilitating an injury. But, a basic yoga class, a few laps of the pool, or walk around the block isn't going to noticeably tire an otherwise healthy adult.
Time-consuming? That's likely short-sighted when you account for reduced longevity, time spent ill, etc. A few hours a week isn't that much time in the overall scheme of things.
And exercise should almost never be painful. The only exceptions would be rehab or training for a specific event.
What's left: 2 hours. If I spend 30 minutes exercising, that's 25% of my discretionary time every day. That feels pretty time-consuming, even though I do think it's worth it.
Though even with 4 hours, depending on the person, every day after work might feel like they need their entire 8 hours of free time between work and sleep just to survive, ideally they'd have more. Technology was supposed to give us more leisure time we can put into things like exercise but here we are still slaving away at desk jobs for 40 hours a week.
That's why I have a problem with things like CrossFit, P90X and the like. Time-consuming, that I can't help with. But "tiring" and "sometimes painful"? Unless you're a competitive athlete, you're doing it wrong. The article points this out (and I'm basically echoing the sentiment of the article). A 30 minute walk with the dog? That shouldn't be tiring or painful (or if it is, you really need to do it more often).
But I'm guessing that some folks get the impression that "exercise" must be EXTREME!!!!11!! or it doesn't count. Why work on bringing your half-marathon time down (which is a much more appropriate goal for the 20 mile/week runner) when you can slog through the death march of a six hour marathon?
A little overweight? A lot overweight? Don't exercise because you don't think you'd survive the CrossFit your cow-orkers are doing? Don't think epic mountain bike rides are really your thing? Meh, fuck all that, put your shoes on, go for a walk for a half hour. Your cow-orkers won't be impressed, but I will be. Yes, a guy with multiple marathons (and a whole list of other shit you don't care about) under his belt whose idea of a good Saturday morning is running up some mountain for a few hours, will be impressed. Because inertia is really good at keeping you on that couch, and if you can overcome that and make that first step out the door, in my book your ahead of this guy who gets out the door out of habit more than anything else.
So true. It works the other way too. Once you get into the routine of exercising it becomes easier to work it into your schedule.
I also agree that exercise should never be painful. Unfortunately, we have a "no pain, no gain" mentality about exercise in this country. I don't even think the exercises advertised as "extreme" (ala P90X/Insanity/Crossfit) need to be painful, but some people will push themselves more than they should (Crossfit in particular is notorious for poor trainers overpushing people to injury).